Underdetermination

Research

The condition in which available evidence is insufficient to decide uniquely between competing theories or interpretations; the Duhem-Quine thesis holds that evidence always underdetermines theory choice, since any observation can be accommodated by revising a theory's auxiliary assumptions instead.

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — “Underdetermination of Scientific Theory”, Kyle Stanford (first published 12 August 2009; substantive revision 4 April 2023) plato.stanford.edu accessed 22 September 2026

Kyle Stanford’s entry states the core idea: “the evidence available to us at a given time may be insufficient to determine what beliefs we should hold in response to it.” It distinguishes two forms. Holist underdetermination arises because “our inability to test hypotheses in isolation leaves us underdetermined in our response to a failed prediction”. Contrastive underdetermination is “the quite different possibility that for any body of evidence confirming a theory, there might well be other theories that are also well confirmed by that very same body of evidence.” The second is the one that bears on interpreting a study: a fit between data and theory does not by itself exclude rival theories that fit equally well.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is cited because it carries a named author and a dated revision for each entry, so the claim is attributable to a person on a date — which is the test this lexicon applies to reference sources, and the reason an open-edit encyclopedia is not used. The application to research practice above is this lexicon’s reading.

Related terms

• Abbreviation
• Abstract
• Abstraction
• Academic Database
• Analysis
• Annotation

Rewritten from a truncated AJG archive entry, August 2026.